Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
Bodies in Transit: The Plastic
Subject of Alphonso Lingis*
Tom Sparrow
Duquesne University, USA
Abstract
Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations
of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical
training with an ex­tensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand
of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis
inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking
which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart
from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis’ phenomenology of sensation
in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see,
Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the
materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation.
Keywords: body; sensation; plasticity; Lingis; phenomenology
One is born with forces that one did not contrive. One lives by giving
form to these forces. The forms one gets from the others.
— Alphonso Lingis, “We Mortals”
A Synthetic Phenomenologist
Alphonso Lingis is well-known in the Anglophone world for his transla­
tions. We continental philosophers have all read his renderings of Levinas’
Totality and Infinity and Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. He
has also gained an admirable following with his philosophical travelogues,
books like Excesses, Abuses, and Trust. In a way, even these texts offer us
translations: of unfamiliar customs and peoples, of technical concepts and
slippery philosophical jargon. In the travelogues, readers witness phenom­
enological descriptions of individuals and cultures which are laced with the
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thinking of alterity familiar to Levinas’ readers, and the phenomenology
of the lived body that Merleau-Ponty has handed down to the continental
tradition. Set either between or beyond these two notions—alterity and
the lived body—is Lingis himself, a philosopher who not only builds a
bridge between American and continental thought, but who is the literal
embodiment of a synthetic brand of American continental philosophy. As
if William James and Emmanuel Levinas were co-opted to author all of the
guide books in the Lonely Planet series,1 many of Lingis’ hybrid books read
like reports from the field. His missives from Latin and North America, the
Far East, Antarctica, Africa, and Europe set Lingis apart from the rest of the
American philosophers working in Husserl’s wake. His (inter)continental
approach spans the globe and reaches beyond the technical skirmishes of
academic philosophy. Diane Ackerman gives us a splendid caricature of
Lingis’ modus operandi:
Alphonso Lingis—whose unusual books, Excesses and
Libido, consider the realms of human sensuality and
kinkiness—travels the world sampling its exotic erotica.
Often he primes the pump by writing let­ters to friends.
I possess some extraordinary letters, half poetry, half
anthropology, he sent me from a Thai jail (where he
took time out from picking vermin to write), a convent
in Ecuador, Africa (where he was scuba-diving along the
coast with filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl), and Bali (where he
was taking part in fertility rituals).2
The time is ripe for Lingisian studies to be extended and considered
more closely.3
By examining the subjectivity of Alphonso Lingis as it is accounted
for in his phenomenological writings, we can catch a glimpse of his
philosophical perspective on embodied subjectivity and its relation to the
sensible world. On the move, Lingis sets philosophy in motion—his travel
is phenomenology at work. This essay is an attempt to articulate a few
important dimensions of Lingisian travel.
Lingis is a wanderer and a cosmopolitan philosopher par excellence,
perpetually in search of sensations and constantly giving expression, or
the closest thing to it, to the sensualities he encounters. This sensuality is
not only sought out in each of Lingis’ travels, it operates as a condition of
possibility in his philosophy. Speaking boldly, we might call him a tran­
scendental phenomenologist of sensuality. A permanent itinerant, perhaps
Lingis is one of the nomads that Deleuze and Guattari speak so fondly
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
about. It is rumored that Deleuze was a secret admirer of Lingis, and it is
not difficult to see why, whether true or not.4 He is a phenomenologist of
the sensitive body, the materiality of subjectivity, and the disarming effects
of travel. Focusing on a few of Lingis’ properly philosophical texts, we will
here examine the constitutive roles of sensation, affect, and sensuality5 in
the Lingisian conception of embodiment.
Lingis has always operated from within the phenomenological move­
ment, tarrying with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas especially. Kant,
Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, and Deleuze are likewise familiar company. He
is very close to each one of these thinkers and his writing often moves into
a region of indiscernibility when he is explicating their thought. But he is
no mere commentator. Woven into his strictly philosophical fabric are the
faces, desires, lusts, fetishes, drives, and emotions of the innumerable others
in which he has immersed himself. Photographs of these others inaugurate
his chapters, capturing in a glance what takes pages to describe. His original
work flows from his affective immersions, and in this way we might also
call him a radical empiricist, if we mean by this that his philosophy takes
seriously the plurality constitutive of sensibility and refuses to sacrifice
the infinity of sensuous relations embedded in the world of experience.
If Lingis breaks with his phenomenological predecessors through a reassertion of the indelible impact of sensation on our subjectivity, it is
at the same time that he is energized by a labyrinth of unknown bodies
and intelligences, and the claims they have made on his body’s own
intelligibility. His philosophy is invested with a kind of non-philosophy,
and these two modes of thought circulate through one another, creating a
feedback loop of theoretical and sensuous exploitation. In short, Lingis’
travel testifies to the irreducibility and immanence of the sensuous, and
its role in constituting and reconstituting ourselves. A system of sensation,
sensuality, and sensibility abounds in his texts and mobilizes to contest the
dominance of our rationality, the fluency of our affects, and our mastery
over the carnal world.
Sensation and Perception:
Some Phenomenological Explanations
What is a sensation? Some might classify sensation as a legend, a
fabulous non-event or a dissimulation. Sensation is nothing more than a
deficient mode of knowing, and thus encountered only negatively, as in
Descartes. Sensation is said to be always already worked up through the
perceptual or cognitive apparatus, as in Kant. Before we know it, the idealist
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revolution tells us, the data of sensation have already been commandeered
by our unifying faculties. We have perceptions, but can lay no real claim
to sensations: they are the noumenal and the unthinkable, merely inferred.
The philosophy which begins with perception or, more precisely, which
champions perception’s primacy, seems to have already forsaken the reality
of sensation. Must phenomenology abandon sensation? Lingis believes that
this is precisely what is missing from phenomenology, and thus what aligns
it with idealism. In Sensation, Lingis declares: “Phenomenology argues that
our sensations themselves are intentional; they are givens of sense, or give
sense—orientation and meaning.”6 But a sensation can also be an interrup­
tion, a shift, an instigation and a disorientation. Sensations can announce
the absence of sense or the onset of senselessness. A sensation can function
as a kind of short-circuit of our habitual affects, our perceptual routines, our
calculated taming of the environment.
For Lingis, neither sensibility nor sensuality can flaunt the confident
directedness of intentionality. These ambiguous passivities are basic modes
of human being and enable a flexibility within the subject. Our bodies
are displaced by sensations. Lingis theorizes the interruptive mode of
sensation, sensation as immanently directive, yet without apparent meaning.
By drawing a division between the representational and the affective
dimensions of sen­sation, he allows us to distinguish between sensation as
sense and sensation as affect.7 His phenomenology of sensation unfolds into
an ontology of the sensible. This is accomplished through a subtle analysis
of our sensibility, one that creates a tension within the phenomenological
tradition and which we will have to define.
Sensation intervenes in our practice and lets slip our hold on things and
on ourselves. To deny its interruptive power is to deny the subordination of
consciousness to the world of corporeal experience, to assert the primacy
of human access to the sensuous world which we live from. It is to pretend
that the phenomenal world has never once collapsed its appearance and
asserted its fantastic weight upon our bodies. Lingis’ phenomenology of
sensation disrupts the flattening of the world which is achieved in Husserl’s
eidetic reduction, the reduction of real objects to their phenomenal facades.
It is true that the senses can be deceptive…but only to an epistemology bent
on certainty. Sensation is not first and foremost an epistemological theme.
From a phenomenological standpoint which has bracketed knowledge
claims, can sensation as such really be doubted or reduced? Can we live
without sensation?
Against the grain of the phenomenological tradition, Lingis maintains
that we cannot fully recognize our being-in-the-world in descriptions of
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subjectivity that place nothingness or a hollowed-out ego at the center of
our consciousness; or when the lived body is considered the vessel of an
intentional consciousness that opens onto the world and moves about it
with an undisturbed practical savvy (S ix). The lived body is not merely a
diagram­matic entity; embodied perception is not reducible to a unified grip
on the world, as though embodiment could guarantee that the world will
always be encountered as an intelligible whole as long as it maintains its
familiar spatiotemporal coordinates. For Lingis, the notion of embodiment
describes first and foremost a sensual event replete with amorous and
deadly—in a word, impractical—drives. We are born with forces that strive
to exceed our being, and we die when we are finally overcome by such
forces. These are what Lingis calls the excesses of life. As we will see,
these excesses can get caught up into circuits, or take on forms that keep
them in check.
Lingis is constantly in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
of perception, diverging ever-so-slightly from it to make room for sensa­
tion. Merleau-Ponty goes to great lengths to exclude raw sensation from
his account of perceptual experience. Perception, as intentional, is always
perception-of, always the apprehension of a transcendent figure against a
meaningful background. Phenomenologically, this feature of perception
is, in a technical sense, given. This background is projected by some
human perceiver and ensures that the unity of things always precedes the
multiplicity of their qualities. Perception structures sense-experience and
wards off the immediacy of sensation with Gestalten. The “prejudice of
sensation” gives way, in Merleau-Ponty’s description, to the immediacy
of the meaningful whole: “henceforth the immediate is no longer the
impression, the object which is one with the subject, but the meaning, the
structure, the spontaneous ar­rangement of parts.”8 The Phenomenology of
Perception is a work that traces the minutiae of perception, and above all
champions the object/horizon structure of our intentional experience. In it,
an always intelligible form stages our interaction with the world.
The critique of what William James would call atomistic sensationalism
is carried out by Merleau-Ponty in his defense of a desubstantialized subject,
a subject fundamentally “conceived as an intentionality, a self-transcend­
ing movement of ex-istence, and no longer as the place of inscription of
impressions.”9 Our most elementary experiences are always already mean­
ing-laden, figural, given to us as a thing that we can get our hands around.
Merleau-Ponty insists on the continuous, ordered, and horizonal structure
of the stream of consciousness. What Merleau-Ponty calls the “horizon” of
consciousness, James refers to as “fringe.” The fringe is comprised of the
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sets of physical and phenomenal relations that surround any particular act
of consciousness, any specific conscious state.10 It accompanies, but does
not constitute, the form of sensory experience. For James, these relations
are derived from the physiology of the body-brain schema; they constitute,
in addition to the objects they involve, what Lingis would call one “level”
of the world. Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, has to consider relations from the
standpoint of the non-physical and non-ideal structures of consciousness.
Objects and relations are seen as real only insofar as they make sense, or
appear within a subjective horizon. Thus, for him, relations remain at the
phenomenal object/horizon level instead of opening up their own discrete
sensuous dimension. Relations, for Merleau-Ponty and most other phenom­
enologists, are substantialized in the act of perception, but at the expense of
their real substantiality. It is not the physiology of the body that apprehends
objects and their relations, but the intentional structure of a desubstantialized
sensory-motor schema. Here we glimpse Merleau-Ponty’s idealism, but we
also begin to see where Lingis situates himself, working out a middle way
between the physiology of fringes and the phenomenology of perception.
This will eventually bring him into proximity with Deleuze.
Is it possible to reconcile the phenomenological account of subjectivity,
along with the critique of sensationalism carried out by James and MerleauPonty, with the reality of sensation? What if sensation could be shown to be
the hinge upon which reality swings, but somehow outside, while at the same
time essential to, experience? Kant made sensory input a transcendental
condition of human experience by noting the emptiness of the categories in
themselves, but at the end of the day he cognized sensation right out of the
experiential world. At best, sensation, insofar as it is said to derive from the
thing-in-itself, is put into a precarious position, and it behoves us to remain
agnostic about its reality. Lingis, by contrast, reminds us that “to sense
something is to be sensitive to something, to feel a contact with it, to be
affected by it” (PE 59). He proceeds to provide evidence for sensation by
highlighting our passivity vis-à-vis sensory input. Sensation is not simply a
stimulus given to and understood by our sensory-nervous system. It is also
an exterior force that reminds us that we are situated against our will in a
sensible field that leaves us susceptible to the system of elements that make
up that field. As subjects, we are not only cognizant beings, but incarnated
in a sensuous, preformed, and sometimes hostile world. Vulnerable and ex­
posed, the “level of sensation would be the original locus of openness upon
things, or contact with them” (PE 59, italics added). Before it is contoured,
before it is ordered and subjected to human cognition, the phenomenologi­
cal field is a sensible material set to charge the sensuality of the subject via
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the body’s sensitivity (PE passim).
Lingis credits Merleau-Ponty’s later work, The Visible and the Invis­
ible, for having evaded the idealist trappings of Kantianism and modern
epistemology. Actually, Lingis tells us, already in Phenomenology of Percep­
tion Merleau-Ponty sought to extricate himself from idealism through the
complementary notions of lived body, motility, and the corporeal schema
(PE 62). Against the classical accounts, the subject is re-substantialized,
re-sensitized11 and given back to the sensuous medium by Merleau-Ponty’s
practical-corporeal concepts. With Merleau-Ponty, the synthesis of experi­
ence is enacted not by the incorporeal medium of pure reason, but by the
mobile perceptual schema that is incarnate consciousness. Against the
twin pillars of modern epistemology, intellectualism and empiricism, he
writes in The Primacy of Perception that embodied perception carries out
a “practi­cal synthesis” and “reveals another modality which is neither the
ideal and necessary being of geometry nor the simple sensory event.”12 He
continues: “This subject, which takes a point of view, is my body as the
field of percep­tion and action [pratique]—in so far as my gestures have a
certain reach and circumscribe as my domain the whole group of objects
familiar to me.”13 Supplementing Merleau-Ponty slightly, Lingis identifies
this medium and its population of things as a material nexus of sensuality
and sensuous objects. It is the very materiality of beings—ourselves
included—that enables sensuous interactions and allows Merleau-Ponty to
move toward the notion of flesh and speak of it as the folding back on itself
of being (PE 62-63).14
The folding of the subject into the sensuality of being is what Lingis,
fol­lowing Levinas, calls “involution.” The substance of subjectivity
is produced from out of the field of desires, pleasures, and affections
accumulated within the sensual matrix. “Sensuality is a movement of
involution in a medium.”15 The ontogenesis of the subject is carried out
by this non-intentional, non-objective, non-attributive movement. Firstperson talk of “my domain” and “familiar objects” (Merleau-Ponty) loses
its stability when subjectivity is conceived in this way. The subject must
now be thought in terms of its original affectivity, and sensation has to be
seen as an immanent modifica­tion of being, an impression that moves or
orders the flesh—mine, yours, ours together. Lingis shifts attention away
from the invisibility attributed to the flesh by Merleau-Ponty and toward
the more tangible flesh of the elemental. This has the effect of placing both
the visible and the invisible on an equal plane, ontologically speaking.
Lingis writes:
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The sensible flesh can be a locus where all schemes and
movements of things can be captured, not because it is
a blank slate or hollow of nothingness and thus a pure
receptivity, but because it already contains all that the
visible, the tangible, the audible is capable of, being visible,
tangible, and audible itself. Itself a field where the sensible
radiates and schematizes itself, it captures the patterns
the exterior things emit on the variations or frequency
modulations of its own body schema. (PE 63)
The subject in Merleau-Ponty finds itself caught up in the sensible
world, the subject-object dialogue,16 and a kind of corporeal grammar that
organizes the lived body and inscribes its corporeity with sense. This still
leaves the subject in control of itself and with a certain degree of unimpeach­
able practical knowledge, what Lingis identifies as praktognosis. Despite
the carnal metaphor and its connotation of the immanence of subject and
world, Lingis feels that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh tames sensation
by mediating it with the intentional structure of perception. But perception,
Lingis contends, is derivative of the sensible: “The continuity of the visible
field of the world and the visible flesh itself is not itself something perceived
or effected through perception, if it is what makes perception possible”
(PE 69). It seems that sensation must remain subordinate to perception in
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Just as with Kant, the phenomenology
of perception relegates sensation to the imperceptible outside, thus setting
it at a distance that remains irrecoverable. This is not to say that Lingis af­
firms our knowledge of raw sensation, but his phenomenology is willing to
demonstrate our intimacy with the sensible.
What Lingis seeks to reintroduce into phenomenological description
is the surplus of sensation that acts as the transcendental condition of per­
ceptual life. This surplus is what he will sometimes identify as sensuality,
and at other times, the voluptuous or affectivity. In turn, he asserts the
disruptive, or what he calls the imperative force, of sensuous/sensual be­
ing. Here we catch sight of Lingis’ debt to Levinasian metaphysics. The
sensual, for Lingis, is not something about which we must remain silent,
an underlying “I know not what.” Our sensibility reveals the sensual to us
through its affective character: the often unbearable weight of being, or
the unsurpassed pleasure of existence is hoisted upon us as a condition of
our remaining alive in the world. To live is to be affected by the material
imposition of existence, to feel ourselves engulfed in the plenitude of the
flesh of the world, which is nothing other than our own fleshy substance. As
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Lingis writes in Phenomenological Explanations, “to sense is to sense the
substantial” (PE 67). Our subjection to sensuality is the original modality
of our subjectivity (PE 69).
Material Subjects, Sensitive Bodies
Modern conceptions of the subject hover around the idea that subjectiv­
ity is that element of human being which gathers and unifies, masters and
orders the continuous series of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, emotions,
decisions, and actions that each one of us undergoes. This is the cogito of
Descartes as well as its many variations, most of which tarry with a variation
of idealism that puts a premium on human access to the world. (This does
not seem to be the case with the Spinozan subject; Spinoza is a stark excep­
tion to this rule.)17 In Kant, the “I think” that denotes the purest form of the
rational subject is both the transcendental and transcendent condition of
any possible human experience. The multiplicity that is the sensuous world,
which stands at an irreducible distance from the Kantian ego, is brought to
its only manifestation by the synthesis effected by the apperceptual self.
For Kant, the world as I know it is my world because it is synthesized by
me; the power of this synthesis is the work of the understanding and of
judg­ment. The manifold of sensation is always already understood by the
self. If it were not so, experience would crumble and the self would lose its
hold on the world. Indeed, the world would fall into oblivion.18
The embodied consciousness that we find in Lingis resists Kantian unity
by remaining in contact with the multiplicity of sensuous material. Although
Lingis never mentions it, his phenomenology follows in the footsteps of a
fellow American, William James. It is instructive to read them together,
as has already been suggested. James is rightly considered a forerunner of
Husserl and a phenomenologist in his own right. He, like Lingis, fiercely
resists the reduction of the sensuous and preserves its vivacity in a luscious
prose that is rare in academic writing. James is a philosopher of immanent
(which is not to say immediate) sensations, a radical empiricist whose work
is very much in the Bergsonian vein. (James was more than a decade older
than Bergson, but their work was mutually inspiring.) Lingis shares James’
flare for colorful prose, the plurality of experience, and the abundance of
empirical life. Both of them could be considered “vitalists,” albeit of differ­
ent species. Above all, both James and Lingis insist on the unfathomable
levels—the edges, lines, angles, hues, and planes that partition the world into
unexplored and perhaps impregnable enclaves and passages—of sensible
experience.19 Together they form the seeds of an American philosophical
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tradition which has yet to be classified.
Lingis and James share a common critique of the Kantian subject. James
distinguishes between two selves, one corporeal (the “me”) and the other
immaterial (the “I”).20 These two selves correspond roughly to the empirical
and transcendental subjects in Kant, respectively. In his Psychol­ogy, James
gives a shorthand account of the pure Kantian ego and calls it simply the
“combining medium.” To apperceive and synthesize is the “chief function”
of the immaterial I, says James. The function of the I is to organize into
a neat totality the multiplicity that is sense-experience. James writes:
“Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the notion of combination
has no sense.”21 For James, it is the fluid stream of consciousness that gives
unity to the successive states of consciousness. Rationally organized states
of consciousness are produced as convergences at the end of the stream
with the help of physiological and unconscious processes, but the stream
remains primary. This is why James cannot be said to follow in the wake
of Kant, who must subordinate the influx of sensory data to the categories
of the understanding.
Where James breaks with Kant is also where Lingis departs from the
idealist strain in Merleau-Ponty. What allows James’ empiricism to evade the
Kantian critique of ordinary empiricism (Hume’s empiricism) is precisely
what Deleuze will find, ironically, so valuable about Hume—his attribution
of an immanent transcendental (“radical”) character to objective sensation.
For James, this amounts to the rejection of a psychologized association­
ism, and a positing of the objective reality of relations between material
things, the pure plurality of sensuous experience, and an uncompromising
resistance to the holistic tendencies of rationalism.22 Similarly in Lingis,
the immanence of sensation is shown to condition the practical, competent
organization of the world, which is mistakenly believed to be the product
of the transcendent structure of perception (Merleau-Ponty) or cognition
(Kant). Whatever empiricism is alive in Kant and Merleau-Ponty, it is not
radical enough for James and Lingis.
It is not just the substantive states that build up consciousness, ac­
cording to James. The transitive states are equally constitutive of subjective
experience.23 What’s more, he says that the conjunctive relations entered
into by the conscious subject are affective in character, grounded in “a
feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as
readily as we says a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.”24 These feelings,
for the most part, are harbored in the “material me,” or the body and its
corporeal relations.25 James advances a theory of corporeal grammar, or
embodied significance, that is not without its analogues in the diacritical
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systems of twentieth-century structuralism. But his is not a theory of the
subject as sociocultural function, but as materially modified or produced
by bodily relations. Lingis, follow­ing James, will call the ungraspable,
sensuous elements in which we move “free-floating adjectives,” (I 14) so
as to express the “grammatical” nature of our embodiment. None of this
reduces human subjects to articulations within a discursive chain. It testifies
to the fact that our bodies are sensitive to other bodies, that the conjunction
and disjunction of bodies is felt, as well as perceived and enunciated.
As Lingis sees it, the combinatory function is not the basic function
of the ego. At least, he sees the combinatory function as conditioned, not
as spontaneous. James’ stream seems to be equally contingent and unruly.
This is partly because both thinkers are so close to the phenomenology of
perception, and the specifically corporeal form given to it by Merleau-Ponty.
As Renaud Barbaras has argued recently, any philosophy of perception
worth its salt is going to have to begin its analysis of subjectivity with
perception, and resist the temptation to subsume this capacity under the
categories of rational thought. What we call a sensible intuition—which
is nothing less than a perceptual encounter with the world—is the first
revelation of an ego or self. This means, for the philosophy of perception,
that apperception must conform to perception, not the other way around.26
The ego is not first and foremost an imprisoned and untouchable
ab­straction under which all experience is indexed. Nor is it merely a
discursive construct, a placeholder “in the grammar of kinship, economic,
and political codes.” It is a naked, exposed sensuality. It is a material body
invested with energy and pleasure and lust and bliss. Vulnerably exposed,
it is true; but writhing with joy beneath its bare flesh (I 18). Immersed in
the elements, the ego is fundamentally a sensuous element itself, wrapped
in sensuality, “a movement of involution that intensifies and releases its
energies into the elements in which the sensual body is immersed.” The
elements comprise the vague, ungraspable sensuous medium of nascent
life—sonority, luminosity, terrestriality. As Lingis exclaims: “How calm
the dawn is! How fresh it feels! How pungent it smells!—the zest and the
savor vitalizing one’s spiraling sensuality are cast forth again indefinitely
into the depths of the dawn” (I 19). The subject stripped down is a bare
enjoyment of the depths, of the countless levels of unfounded sensations.
Like James and Deleuze, Lingis advocates a form of transcendental
empiricism that gives ontological priority to the role of pre-personal sensi­
bility and corporeality in the constitution of our experience, thus making
bodily sensation a condition of possibility of rationality, rational discourse,
and epistemology generally. This follows Erwin Straus’ The Primary World
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of Senses, in which he writes:
Sensing is not ruled by the ‘I think’ which, according to
Kant, must accompany all apperception. In sensing, nothing
is apperceived. The sensing being, the animal, does not
confront its world as a thinking being, but is, rather, related
to it simply in uniting and separating.27
There is a type of intelligibility nascent in sensibility, an intelligibility
that is affective before it is intelligible and vital before it is rational. We
might call this, following Straus, an alingual animal intelligibility. It is a
pre-ratio­nal intelligence that we humans share with the other fleshy beings.
We, as human-animal subjects, are already subjected to a sensuous medium
that preempts the judgments and rational discourses we have either invented
or acquired in order to master this medium and attempt to break off from
the animal kingdom.
The circuit of rational discourse which is developed and deployed,
the technological and sociocultural manufacture that we toil over to wrest
ourselves free from the demands of our biological composition, and the
community of modern individuals that each one of us is born into—all of
this is preempted by our encounter with other bodies, intruder or seducer
bodies, and the appeals they make on our own. This singular community of
sustenance and separation is a community which is marked by the exposure
of oneself to another in the sensuous medium. My flesh is nothing other
than your flesh. But my body is at the same time exposed to your body,
the body of some animal, and the totality of objects which are folded into
the levels of the world. These levels allow Lingis’ phenomenology of
sensation to avoid the kind of holism that would eliminate separation and
freeze every entity in an undifferentiated plenum. Phenomenologically, we
know this is not our state of affairs. Our discrete, sensitive bodies commune
through a labyrinthine carnality that holds us apart at the same time that we
impress ourselves upon one another, modifying the totality of the sensuous
substance. Lingis writes:
The exposed surfaces of the other do not position themselves
before one as so much data for one’s interpretation or
as so much amorphous mat­ter for one to give form and
significance to. The carnal breaks through, collapsing the
distances across which its presence can be represented.
Carnal surfaces expose themselves without offering
possibilities to one’s powers. […] In the immediacy of their
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presence, they are irremediably exterior: the surface of a
sensibility, a susceptibility, a pleasure, and a torment that is
irremediably alien to one and exposes a vulnerability and
an alien mortality that summons one.28
The difference between you and I is not negligible because it is
immanent, because our carnality unites us. Something of you always
exceeds my repre­sentation of you. Alterity, however, must operate within
the immanence of the sensuous element; a pure immanence traverses the
perceived gap between I and other (S 80). Lingis has replaced Levinas’
radical otherness with a radical immanence, but without giving up the
exigencies of responsibility. The problem of the ethical meaning of
immanent alterity emerges in Lingis’ reconfiguration of the imperative.
My Body As Material Other: Sustenance and Fatigue
The always antecedent presence of the material other, along with the
desire or disgust that it inspires in the constitution of my subjectivity, struc­
tures the ethical content of Levinas’ philosophy. Lingis takes up Levinas’
project, the phenomenology of the face/other, under the banner of a Kantian
notion: the imperative. The imperative is a responsibility laid upon us by our
very existence, our simple being-in-the-world. Not because we are situated
among other rational beings which demand our respect, but because we
could not coordinate ourselves without the stimulation of others (rational
and non-rational), we are bound to an imperative. For Lingis, the imperative
denotes our inability to fend off sensations, our defenselessness in the face
of things, other persons and animals, and the assault their earnest reality
aims at us. The imperative lays claim to us as responsible agents because we
are composed of the substance—the elements—of the material world. No
naturalistic fallacy is committed here. Lingis shows how the is of existence
is derived from its ought; that is, we exist because our bodies must respond
to a barrage of directives which offer to sustain and/or diminish our vitality.
Either way, we must respond to these directives which we call sensations.
Straus puts it in the following terms: “Although sensations do not resemble
the things which touch us, although they are only signs of the existence of
external objects, they can, nevertheless, be directional signs—that is, signs
by which the other, the world, discloses itself.”29
As world-disclosing sensations, pain and pleasure indicate the pres­
ence of danger or the absence of need. What we call our freedom, our
independence, our autonomy is not a brute fact or a given. It is gained.
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It is a significant mode of being, a course prescribed to us by our senses
and by the sensations upon which we feed. The singularity of our lives
is delineated, says Levinas, by the nourishment we enjoy in living from
the offerings of life. “Enjoyment,” he says, “is a withdrawal into oneself,
an involution. What is termed an affective state does not have the dull
monotony of a state, but is a vibrant exaltation in which dawns the self.”30
The alterity that we find ourselves thrown into, energized by, worn out by,
is what gives us life and sustains us in our striving. It individuates us from
the rest of our corporeal community, makes us the subjects we are. Before
we can become weak, tired, or wounded we must thrive or suffer at the
hands of being-alive in the light, the earth, the air.
For both Levinas and Lingis, the elemental world provides a transcen­
dental condition for our sustenance, and thus for our selfhood. The
elements are our freedom (I 22). “Life lives on sensation; the elements are
a nourishing medium” (I 17). The phenomenology of sensuous existence
becomes here an ontology31 of corporeal, elemental, sensual subjectivity.
Lingis writes:
Levinas’s phenomenological exposition shows that prior
to the anxious taking hold on things which for Heidegger
makes our sensibility practi­cal from the first, there is the
contact with the sensuous medium, there is sensuality. We
find things, we find ourselves, in the light, in air, on terra
firma, in color, in a resonant zone. Through sensuality
we find ourselves steeped in a depth before we confront
surfaces and envision the profiles of objects. Sensibility
opens us not upon empty space, but upon an extension
without determinate frontiers, a plenum of free-floating
qualities without substrates and enclosures, upon luminosity,
elasticity, vibrancy, savor. (S 80)
Against Merleau-Ponty, Lingis asserts that the perception of objects
always occurs from out of a sensual state. Sensuality becomes the fertile
ground of being-in-the-world. If Lingis breaks with Levinas, it is over the
issue of the reality of objects. Although he affirms the primacy of sensuality,
and, in a sense, considers contours and edges to be derivative, Lingis is
not willing to efface the reality of defined and determinate objects. This
would land him in a modified Kantianism that he wants to avoid. Graham
Harman has shown recently, in his Guerrilla Metaphysics, that Lingis
toes the line between himself and the whole phenomenological tradition
by affirming the autonomy of objects. Where for Levinas the reality of
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
things is overshadowed by the “human hypostatization” of them, Lingis
wields a realism that treats objects—and, by consequence, their sensible
emissions—as the individual substances that they are. Harman writes:
“The autonomy of stars and coral reefs is real for Lingis, no less than the
independence of electric eels, cinemas, sunflower fields, snowflakes, and
molten ores buried deep in the moon.”32 The countless objects and levels
of the world are not dependent on us for their sensual energy, they offer
themselves as so many avenues of pleasure that go about their business
even when humanity is nowhere in sight.
The elements that give life to each one of us by offering themselves
as the very stuff of our existence are sensuous material—luminosity,
tactility, and sonority bathe our sensitive bodies. As the real source of our
nourishment, they lend us sensibility and illuminate our world. Through
the elements, the affective quality of sensuality—the unbearable or ethereal
modes of bare life—is able to condition our “spontaneity.” No one can
spontaneously wrest their psyche from a depressive state or truly induce
a rapturous joy within themselves without the influence of some external
power. Sensibility is not formal in its pure state, as Kant thinks. It does
not come from inside and project itself outward; it does not derive from
some transcendent location, over and beyond the sensuous manifold. The
perceived sensuous manifold is always immersed within a sensuality which
generates a creature whose sensibility emerges with its ripening.
Lingis sees sensibility as consubstantial with death. “In savoring the
materiality of things sensibility has the taste of its own mortality” (S 81).
Here, sensibility is not just a nutritive faculty, but is also a conduit for de­
generation, precisely because it is contingent. In old age, sensibility yields
to impairment and senility. “It is the clay of our own body, dust that shall
return to dust, that knows the earth and knows itself as terrestrial. It is the
liquid crystals of our eyes that are turned to the stars as to eyes of the night”
(I 63). It is the liquidity of our eyes that becomes murky and prevents us
from fixing upon the stars, even when they continue to shimmer. We are
mortal subjects, not inviolable egos. We move our bodies throughout the
world, initiating movement and automatically expending the energy we
accumulate from the substance of existence. This is our burden; the source
of our fatigue is living as such. Corporeity weighs upon us as the obligation
to continue living.33
Over time, we catch sight of our own degeneration. The substance that
we are begins to give way, to return to the elements that gave it move­
ment. Heidegger says that we exist ecstatically, always bursting forth in
our temporality. Lingis reminds us that it is this same temporality, and our
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in­ability to master our own passing, that both rejuvenates and enervates our
material substance. This failure is no merely ontic contingency, as Heidegger
would say. In Deathbound Subjectivity, Lingis clarifies the ontological value
of our mortal substance: “The inability to put oneself back at one’s begin­
ning, to find oneself once again at the commencement of one’s initiatives,
to recuperate and re-present again what one had begun, which is the inner
diagram of the fatigue in effort, is, across time, the condition of a subject
that forms by aging.”34 That my body deteriorates against my will; that play
can only be sustained for so long; because I imagine my dead body and it is
as such unrecognizable as my body: my self is an other, a foreign body, for
me. This other is disclosed in the world of sensation. As I grow tired and
old, the possibility of my death is simultaneously the actual deterioration of
my subjectivity, the dissolution of what I have managed to bring into order
or to undergo. In pain or exhaustion, the world infiltrates my systems and
overwhelms me.35 All sensitive bodies undergo a process of disorientation
and desensitization as death unravels their competences.
Plasticity: Affective Circuits, Automatism, and Travel
The roots of identity can be found in the affective circuits and sensitive
habits that constitute the substratum of our everyday lives. These are the
generic or routine practices that we induce in ourselves by force of habit
or catch on to, through a kind of behavioral citation, via popular culture,
tradition, and ritual. Affective circuits are survival equipment. As children,
we are especially susceptible to the influence of societal forms. The plastic­
ity of our physiological systems makes us pliable, malleable in the face of
external forces.36 Even perception, says Merleau-Ponty, is physiognomic37
and, therefore, plastic. To be composed of a plastic substance is to be suscep­
tible to influence from the outside, but resistant enough that the integrity
of subjectivity cannot be consumed by the affective excesses of existence.
Of course, we are threatened with destruction by forces we cannot control.
But for the most part, our bodies subsist in a fluctuating material existence
whose various forms prevent the total collapse of subjectivity into brute
matter. This is what is means to be a plastic subject.
Affective circuits economize our actions, as well as relieve a good por­
tion of the weight of our existence and the pain of our immanence to the
material world. Following James, we can locate the basis of our behavioral
habits in our sensations. An affective circuit, or what James calls a habitual
chain, is a series of muscular contractions that are correlated point by point
with a series of sensations. The series is set off by some sensuous stimulus
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
or other, a muscular contraction results and gives rise to a second sensation
(and contraction), a third sensation (and contraction), and so on.38 Affective
circuits aid us in walking, eating, getting dressed, socializing, communicat­
ing, etc.—all the behaviors that are ritualized into the mundane and effort­
less. These rituals and routines find themselves recorded in the musculature
of the body and propelled along by the banal sensations that organize our
typical days. These circuits coalesce into a system that subtracts from the
abundance of incoming sensations and outgoing efforts required by life.
They make up the constitution of our “body’s attitude”39 and, by extension,
the attitudes of culture. The body is laced with an implicit knowledge that
enables our escape from brute being. In Lingis’ terms:
Feelings contracted from others, passed on to others,
perceptions equivalent to and interchangeable with those of
any other, thoughts which conceive but the general format
of the layout about one, sen­tences formulated such that
they can be passed on to anyone—make up the rigorous
and consistent enterprise of evasiveness in the face of the
being that is one’s own to be. (S 82)
Our bodies are adapted to the excessive content of our corporeal existence
and streamline themselves with an habitual form that relieves them of the
overwhelming scenery of life. Our prefabricated and stylized life forms
pre­vent us from imploding in the life of our senses or becoming slaves
to our libidos. For economic purposes, our sensory-motor schema adopts
shortcuts that allow it to run on autopilot. As Bergson has aptly shown,
habits link us into the mechanisms of nature as responses to the directives
laid out by those mechanisms.40 There is no ghostly ego orchestrating the
machinery of the body, but rather a gamut of rites, rituals, ceremonies,
secret passwords and slang, a whole social circuitry which invests the body
with an identity and regulates its sensitivity. This gives the appearance of
automation and total integration into nature or culture.
Our automatic movements, our affective regularities, our corporeal
identity—these forms are imparted to our bodies, so many of which await us
at birth. We are sculpted, pre-sensitized creatures. The corporeal grammar
of our culture seizes us and inscribes our bodies as soon as we emerge from
the bodies of our mothers. A natal trauma invests the child’s subjectivity
with a communal form, a form—a structure, a language—that initiates
the body into the stratified world and removes for good the possibility of
raw sensation. This is the price paid for becoming master of one’s own
field of forces, for giving form to the surplus of sensation that inundates us
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upon entry into the world. These are our birth rites. Our bodies grow more
competent as we mature. We achieve an advanced level of praktognosis as
we become more familiar with the world, its offerings, and our capacity
to get along within it. (Eventually this competence begins to unravel.) In
a parallel formulation, Deleuze and Guattari will say of social “strata”
that “they consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or
locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy….”41
Our cultures impart a form to our bodies that minimizes the dangers
of our plasticity. Culture lends to us its affective circuits so as to keep
us from straying too far toward the extremes of our sensuality or our
sensitiv­ity—these are malleable traits, debilitating at the same time that
they are protective. Our plasticity composes a significant portion of our
vulnerability. It is because our bodies are made up of an organic material
whose substantial­ity yields to external forces that we are sensitive, and
thus susceptible beings. Because we yield, we can encounter. If it were not
so, our flesh would sense nothing. We are vulnerable not only to hostile
forces, but to the mundane, habitual forms imposed on us by our everyday
environment. As Lingis says, “one instinctually arranges one’s life so that
the tasks and the tools and the problems and the encounters will recur the
same each day, one avoids the limits” (S 3). Can we, should we, ward off the
excesses? Is this even our decision to make? Is the excess—pure sensuous
material—not the necessary condition of our formal constitution?
Deleuze and Guattari will exhort us to destratify, to make of ourselves a
“body without organs”—to oppose our own organized existence and open
ourselves to experimentation, to whatever desires may come, to a nomadic
movement that cuts across the circuits of our society.42 The body without
organs is a body that is free to approach the limits, to seek out what Lingis
calls those “situations and adventures in which one might be swept away
with a total and totally new joy” and realize “that one could never know
such joy again” (S 3). The body without organs sloughs off its economizing
forms and perceptual clichés. It travels outward and into the sensuous world,
forsaking its affective circuits and the efficiency of its practical competence.
“A cliché,” Deleuze tells us, “is a sensory-motor image of a thing.”43 Clichés
keep us at an ideal distance from the thing itself, always mediating and
reducing our sensuous experience to the familiar, the comfortable, the safe
and sound. Clichés inhibit our fantasy space. Affective circuits, corporeal
forms, habits, and clichés-each of these devices perform a subtraction from
sensuality and give us the impression that we are masters of our sensitive
bodies. But our bodies are fundamentally enticed, engulfed, invested, and
commanded by sensations that come from outside. Our sensations are not
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
properly our own, even if they singularize us and make specific appeals to
our senses. This is the meaning of Lingis’ imperative. This is what it means
to live from sensation, to be a sensitive body traversing the earth. Travel is
the means by which sensation is co-opted to contest the affective circuits
that form our identity; travel unleashes our bodies’ capacity to affect and
be affected (Spinoza).
The concept of travel, taken in an extended sense, can be considered
central to Lingis’ phenomenology. Lingis intends travel as a destratify­
ing practice, a practice which bursts our world wide-open. Lingis’ major
theoretical book, The Imperative, is a text which develops the thesis that
our sensuality, by its very nature, commands our bodies to travel, to open
themselves up to foreign sensations and respond to the enticement of affects
we are not equipped to assimilate into our typical circuits. Lingis’ primary
claim in The Imperative is that we are not automatons, precisely because
our perceptual and sensual schemata are not hardwired into our physiol­
ogy or transcendental subjectivity, but nourish themselves on the sensuous
elementality that we live from. Indeed, the excesses of desire are the body’s
own vital form of destratification, the force which combats affective and
perceptual automatism. To be caught in an affective circuit is to take on a
contingent corporeal form that can be resisted with the kind of exposure
that comes through travel and encounters with alien forms of life. It is the
kind of contingency that an affect can reconfigure in an instant, as with
the death of a friend or some other unbearable trauma. What is not con­
tingent—but also not formal—is the excessiveness of affectivity itself: it is
precisely our affectivity as genesis, the desire for/of travel, which exceeds
our formal corporeal constitution.44 The psychogenesis of the subject is
nothing other than the sensitive body in transit. This process is no less
necessary for lacking formality. Weakness, discomfort, delight, and decay
are necessary constituents of our material incarnation, but constitutive
features which are generated as we are nurtured by the elements and enjoy
our sensual/sensuous existence. This is the meaning of Lingisian travel.
The Imperative “shows sensibility, sensuality, and perception to be not
reactions to physical causality nor adjustments to physical pressures, nor
free and spontaneous impositions of order on amorphous data, but responses
to directives” (I 3). These directives come from sensation itself, indeed
they are sensation in all of its material manifestations—the humidity of the
air, the scent of an other’s perfume, a tap on the shoulder, the hungry glance
of a dog under our care. All of these phenomena make material claims on
my body and my material self, even if the messages they communicate to
me bear no literal resemblance to the physico-physiological basis of sensa­
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tion itself, or if my cognitive machinery fails to comprehend their plea.
My embodied consciousness, insofar as it is plastic perception, remains
sensitive to innumerable demands and signals.
If there is anything that Lingis asks us to take from his travels, it is a
recognition of the reality of sensations and the contingent constitution of
sensibility. At bottom, the sensuous is a perpetual invitation and disruption
of our practical movements and sensorial mastery, with all of their habitual
investments. Sensations we have, but they are never purely our own. They
belong to a transcendental flesh—a coded, affective elementality—which
unites and separates us while inducing us to movement with appeals to
our sensitivity. The sensory world performs our identities for us. One day
the surplus of sensation rushes in and drenches us with its strange reality.
When we are seized by a debilitating pain, “we feel the world attacking and
invading us,” says Straus.45 Our own bodies give out and fail us where they
once carried us along effortlessly. Other bodies collide with our own and
penetrate through our automatism, intruding on our intentions and shortcircuiting our body-systems. These are the perils and promises of travel.
“The traveler feels anxiety about his personal safety,” writes Lingis. “He
has little confidence in a personal or institutional ethics to hold back the
impulses of mass desperation. The trip there has something of the feel of an
act of recklessness and bravado.”46 We are met with affects, emotions, and
sensations that we are unequipped to accommodate—because we are of the
same substance, the same flesh, the same carnal community. For Lingis,
this is a community of trust, but a trust which is built between those we
trust without knowing or choosing.
In the end, Lingis tells us, we are a community that ultimately “has
nothing in common:” the sustenance which circulates between bodies does
not come from heaven, but from nowhere, from the nothing that sustains
the earth, the elements, and the other. Unlike Levinas, who triangulates the
face to face relation with God, Lingis locates the source of the imperative
and the alimentary within the substantial economy. “In the substance of our
competence other bodies emerge, ethereal and phantasmal—bodies that
materialize forces and powers that are other than those of praktognostic
competence.”47 The singular matrix of forces and passions that organize
our bodies comes from elsewhere, from beyond the world of equipment
that we manipulate together. It is simply anarchic, but it seizes us and sends
us reeling nonetheless. When these forces materialize, it is already too late
for us to have prepared for their coming. When these forces dissipate, our
bodies return to the anonymity of the elements—our common commu­
nity. To say that we have nothing in common is not to say that we cannot
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
respond to the unexpected sensation, but rather it is to say that we cannot
hope to assimilate it before it makes claims upon our being. It is not ours to
assimilate, for it is what nurtures assimilation in the first place. Sensation
is the alimentary.
(Endnotes)
* This paper was originally published in 2007, Janus Head, 10(1): 99-122.
1A popular, budget-friendly travel guide series geared towards backpackers and
hostellers.
2Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage, 1990)
3 Lingis’ original writings have recently prompted the publication of a book of
essays and interviews, Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, eds. Alexander E.
Hooke and Walter W. Fuchs (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). A few
other articles on Lingis are in print in various journals, including: Simone
Fullager, “Encountering Otherness: Embodied Affect in Alphonso Lingis’
Travel Writing,” Tourist Studies 1, no. 2 (2001): 171-183; Alex­ander E. Hooke,
“Alphonso Lingis’s We—A Collage, Not a Collective,” diacritics 31, no. 4
(2001): 11-21.
4 This unconfirmed, yet delicious bit of academic folklore was related to me by
one of Lingis’ former students at Penn State, Graham Harman, via e-mail on
July 20, 2006. I must thank Graham for his generous correspondence.
5 Because sensation is for Lingis always charged with an affective and/or erotic
component, whether pleasurable or painful, I will often employ the term
“sensuality” in places where “sensuousness,” “sensitivity,” or “sensibility”
could work just as well.
6 Alphonso Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (New York: Humanities
Press, 1996), ix. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as S.)
7 In one of his earliest essays, “Sensation and Sentiment: On the Meaning of
Im­manence,” Lingis begins to excavate the “equivocality” of the notion of
sensation. This paper acknowledges the intentional side of sensation, which he
links to the transcendence of the object sensed, before unpacking the immanence
of sensation, which is correlated with the affective capacity of the body. Lingis
here aligns himself with a form of radical empiricism which is derived from
the Levinasian conception of existence as enjoyment and Michel Henry’s
understanding of immanence. It is this empiricism that allows us to bring Lingis
together with Bergson and James. For Lingis’ paper, see Proceedings of the
American Catholic Philosophical
(1967):
69-75.
77, Note Association
36, lines 141and
3: add
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology
of
Perception,
apostrophe to James in “Jamestrans. Colin Smith
(Lon­don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 58.
discussion” and “James notion of
9 Alphonso Lingis, Phenomenological Explanations, (Dordrecht: Martinus
plasticity”
Nijhoff, 1986), 60. (Hereafter cited as PE.)
10 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001),
If there are other typos, I did not
Chapter 2.
catch them. The essay seems to be
intact. Does your
75journal have a print
version, or is it only online?
Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy
11 Consider the following passage from Phenomenology of Perception, 236: “In
short, my body is not only an object among all other objects, a nexus of sensible
qualities among others, but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which
reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their
primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.”
12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed.
James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 14.
13 Merleau-Ponty, Primacy of Perception, 16.
14 There is a whole series of points of contact that obtain between Lingis and Mer­
leau-Ponty which, of course, cannot be treated here. I am presently attempting
to work out their convergences and divergences in another project. What I have
tried to do here is give some sense of the tension introduced by Lingis into
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of corporeity, even though I feel that the similarities
between these two thinkers far outstrip the differences.
15Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998), 15. (Hereafter cited as I.)
16 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 132. “The subject-object
dialogue, this drawing together, by the subject, of the meaning diffused through
the object, and, by the object, of the subject’s intentions—a process which is
physiognomic perception—arranges round the subject a world which speaks to
him of himself, and gives his own thoughts their place in the world.”
17 The question of the unifying rational subject is difficult to locate in Spinoza
because his conception of the mind (in Book II of the Ethics) understands the
mind as the idea of the body. This problematizes our understanding of the mind
as a unifying faculty. I am reluctant to make any definitive judgments about
Spinoza’s relation to the sensuous world. What does seem to be the case is
that, in many ways, Lingis’ (and Levinas’) treat­ment of affectivity is derived
from Spinoza. Lingis might be seen as reaching back beyond Kant, and pulling
Spinoza to the forefront of the continental discussion. I am tempted to say
that Lingis is extremely close to Spinoza, and it is precisely on the problem of
affection that they converge.
18Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (India­
napolis: Hackett, 1996), §16, especially note 202, B134.
19 The “levels” are what Lingis calls, in The Imperative, the plurality of dimensions
of the world. In addition to the natural objects, manufactured things, humans and
other creatures typically recognized by phenomenologists, Lingis recognizes
the elements, lusts, and habitats that impress upon and shelter us. The night
itself is as fundamental as the figure and the horizon in Lingis’ phenomenology;
the night is one level upon which the world rests, a dimension that beckons us
into its depths.
20Cf. James, Psychology, Chapter 3.
21James, Psychology, 67.
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Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis
22 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1996), 41-44. To draw this point out, it is useful to compare James’
position with the remarks that Deleuze makes about Hume and “transcendental
empiricism” in Pure Im­manence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New
York: Zone, 2001).
23 James, Psychology, 27.
24 James, Psychology, 29.
25 James, Psychology, 44.
26 For a concise statement of this basically ontological problem, see the first chapter
of Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of
Perception, trans. Paul B. Milan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
27Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory
Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963),
197.
28Alphonso Lingis, The Community Of Those Who Have Nothing In Common
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 177.
29 Straus, The Primary World of Senses, 208.
30 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969), 118.
31Graham Harman has written recently that, “The imperative actually has an
ontological character even more than an ethical one. Its target is the dreary
tendency to split the world into two mutually incompatible zones, one of them
a mechanistic causal chain of objects blindly assaulting one another, and the
other an arbitrary space of human freedom that imposes subjective values on
a mindless grid of neutral materials.” Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology
and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 62.
32 Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 60.
33Alphonso Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), 154.
34 Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity, 154.
35 Straus, The Primary World of Senses, 208.
36 Cf. James’ discussion of habit and plasticity in Psychology, 2. We might
consider the recent attempt to synthesize neuroscience and phenomenology
in the work of Bernard Andrieu as an updated version of James’ notion of
plasticity. Brought into contact with Lingis, Andrieu’s neurophenomenology
accentuates the realist/materialist line of research at play in much of Lingis’
texts. See, for instance, the program outlined in Bernard Andrieu, “Brains in the
Flesh: Prospects for a Neurophenomenology,” Janus Head 9 (1), 2006: 135155.
37 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 132.
38 James, Psychology, 7-8.
39 James, Psychology, 9.
40 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York:
Citadel, 1974), 231.
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Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy
41 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 40.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159.
43 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 20. Our clichéd
perception precisely cuts out the surplus of sensation which is harbored in every
perceptual experience. This is for practical purposes, of course. “As Bergson
says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always
perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or
rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests,
ideological beliefs and psychological demands.”
44 To understand more fully the import of this ontology of affect, which is funda­
mental to both Levinas and Lingis, it is helpful to contrast it with the potency/act
ontology of Aristotle. Edith Wyschogrod carries out this contrast in a discussion
of Levinas’ notions of “enjoyment” and “living from…” in her Emmanuel
Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Meta­physics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1974), 55. Affect is shown here to break with the telos of (human) action, which
for Aristotle is basic to the very being of activity. The affect of enjoyment,
by contrast, is without purpose; it is simultaneously its own potentiality and
accomplishment, an active passivity which nourishes itself and produces an
excess of itself. What Aristotle lacks is the lived quality of the act itself, the
excess that is not comprehended by the potency/act model. “It is precisely
‘life’,” says Wyschogrod, “which is absent from this picture.”
45Straus, The Primary World of Senses, 208.
46Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004),
60.
47Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 24-25.
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